A Glasgow Trilogy

by George Friel

  He stared down at the table, his eyes on a dirty plate of ham and eggs.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he conceded to his son. ‘Maybe she’s sorry. I don’t know. But there’s some things can never be put right. But that’s a lot of nonsense about a darkie. There was nothing between them. Just because she left me when she was working with a coloured driver some people liked to make up a story and they ended up believing it themselves. But it’s only a story. That wasn’t the trouble. Your mother never had that fault. It was just she said she could help the house by working and I told her she could help it better by being the housewife. I told her if I couldn’t keep a wife I didn’t deserve a wife. My mother never had to go out to work. And she had a hard time of it. My father never had the job I have. That’s what it was about.’

  ‘I want my mother back,’ the boy cried, but only to himself. He couldn’t say it aloud.

  The father waved a hand over the dejected tea-table.

  ‘Come on! You get this table redd and get these dishes washed and stop greeting.’

  ‘You did what was wrong,’ the boy muttered, moving to his chore with the speed of a snail. ‘I’m not greeting.’

  ‘Maybe I did,’ his father answered. ‘Well, you’re damn near greeting. You’ll have to learn not to. It doesn’t get ye anywhere. Maybe I did, but sometimes you’ve got to do what’s wrong to be right.’

  The boy stopped listening. He was thinking. What kind of a house was this, where he had to do the washing and cleaning and shopping and make up the laundry and do the cooking? If his mother had stayed at home he could have lived like other boys instead of having to live like a girl. A rebellion was gathering in him. The road to open insurrection appeared before him as he lay snivelling in bed that night, and when he was doing his paper-rake the next evening he loitered on the stairhead and looked at the advertising pages of the Evening Citizen. If his mother had gone away because she wanted to get more money then a promise of plenty would surely bring her back. Money seemed to be the eternal question and the universal answer.

  He was the only member of the Brotherhood still working after school hours. Everybody else had given up delivering papers, milk, and rolls, and going round with the fruit-lorry or the man with the float of coal-briquettes. Why should they break the law forbidding schoolboys to work, just to earn a few bob, when they had pounds for the lifting? They despised the tips they had once gloated over, but Frank Garson still depended on them. His father gave him little, and what he gave him he gave irregularly. The boy had no grudge. He handed over his wages every week with pride. He couldn’t help being faithful. It was the way God had made him. But he kept all his tips. They were his own the way he saw it.

  And now he pouted thoughtfully, childish brows furrowed, as he read the small ad rates. His father never bought an evening paper, so he felt he could proceed in safety. The prices interested him. It was like sending a telegram. Intimations (Births, Marriages, Deaths) two and six a line; Property, three shillings. Holiday Guide, three shillings, Situations Vacant, three shillings, Personal (Private), four shillings, and Personal (Trade), four and six a line. He wrote his appeal four times on a sheet of jotter- paper before he got it right, and asked Percy to let him use the portable typewriter to type it out fair. He knew Percy was too much of a gentleman to ask what he was typing. He did it in the cellar, alone in a corner, before the start of a mid-week service. GARSON, he jabbed with one finger, and went slowly on, searching the keyboard grimly for the necessary letters. HELEN, he assembled. Come home. Admit was wrong. Money no bother. Frank has loads. Bob.

  He knew his father’s Christian name was Robert and he supposed his mother must have called him Bob, but he couldn’t hear her in his mind. She seemed to belong to that other world he had lived in when he was young. Now he was old, living in a real world, a hard, solid world where things were enemies. He felt he was trying to call up a ghost. But for all his doubts he went to the Citizen office alone, wandered round fearlessly till he found the right counter, and tholed the squint glance of the clerk who counted the words. It cost him sixteen shillings. He paid it with a pound note Percy had thrust on him to make up for not giving him better support against Savage. He took it as a gift from Percy. It came privately from Percy’s pocket, not from the chest in front of the Brotherhood, so he claimed before his conscience that he still hadn’t taken any share of the hoard. It would be time enough to demand his rights in it when his mother came home.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Helen Garson was working the Yoker–Auchenshuggle route with a new driver two nights later. Her husband was right when he had told their son the West Indian had nothing to do with her leaving home, but she still kept up with her old driver. She had to have some friends, and she visited the West Indian and his wife about once a month and had the distraction of sitting for an evening with a happy family where she felt welcome. Apart from that, she was a lonely woman, determined to like living alone. She bashed on, doing her best not to grieve for her man and her boy and her old home in Bethel Street, and she was doing as well as could be expected until two things upset her.

  The first thing was Percy got on her bus about ten o’clock at the Hielenman’s Umbrella, and the sight of him reminded her of Bethel Street and that reminded her of all she was stubbornly forgetting. He wasn’t alone. He was escorting a girl, a long-legged, wide-skirted, pony-tailed, large-breasted, gum-chewing, big-eyed teenager. She knew him at once but he didn’t know her. He was only a boy at school the last time she saw him and now he was like a young man, so stylishly dressed that he looked slightly odd. He sat in the back seat upstairs, holding his girl’s hand and their brows touched as they mooned together the whole journey. She grued a little at the sight of them, for she was an anti-romantic, and the girl seemed to her anyway a stupid-faced doll who would be none the worse for a scrubbing and a haircut. Percy wore the gawky look he had always worn, but he was wearing it with a difference now. Instead of the gawkiness of a backward schoolboy he was showing the gawkiness of the male animal reaching towards the female for the first time and not quite sure how to set about it. She was glad to see them get off at Partick Cross. They linked arms when they stepped on the pavement and she sent a sniff of contempt after them.

  ‘He never was very bright,’ she thought as she rattled upstairs and down, breezily collecting her fares and tyrannizing the passengers as only a Glasgow bus-conductress can. ‘He was aye kind of glaikit and he doesn’t seem to have improved any. Seeing a girl home at his age! And where did he get the money to dress like that? I bet he hasn’t got two pennies to rub together. I don’t know how they do it nowadays, courting before they’re right out of school. And he’s left himself with some journey back home too, the silly fool! It’s no’ a girlfriend he’s got, it’s a pen- pal, staying that distance from him. The things they’ll do when they think they’re in love! Ah well, they’ll get a rude awakening one day and hell mend them. All they think of is sex, they’re sex-mad, these kids nowadays. The way she sat pushing her breasts up to him, must have been pads she was wearing, the little bitch. Ach, they’ll learn one day, when they’ve rent to pay and light to pay and coal to get and weans to feed and clothe.’

  She was so annoyed with Percy for coming on her bus and raising ghosts that she made up for it by tearing him and his girl to pieces all the way along Dumbarton Road to the end of the line.

  Then at the lying-in time there the second thing happened to upset her. It was worse than the first, much worse. She saw her son’s small ad in the paper. It was just a piece of bad luck, for she never bought an evening paper. She happened to see this one because on the last lap of the journey she left her bus for a moment and bought two pokes of chips, one for her driver and one for herself. It was a bad shift they were on, and they had got the habit of buying chips to give them a filling bite between the end of one run and the start of another. The Italian who owned the fish-and-chip shop always served her at once, no matter who else was waiting, and she was back on her bus bef
ore the passengers knew she had left it. She handed the chips in to the driver. They would keep warmer in his cabin than on her platform.

  When the empty bus lay at the terminus she sat downstairs facing her driver, and since he was the strong silent type she occupied herself reading one of the sheets of newspaper Enrico had wrapped round the two pokes.

  ‘That’s last night’s paper you’re reading,’ her driver remarked detachedly, recognizing a headline.

  ‘You don’t expect him to wrap the chips in tonight’s paper, do you?’ she answered crossly, and turned the page.

  She gazed amongst the births, marriages and deaths, delving into the chips with coin-grimed fingers while her driver ate his way steadily through the other poke.

  ‘Harry didn’t put much salt on them the night,’ he commented.

  ‘You’re hell of a talkative all of a sudden,’ she retorted. ‘Just you go get them tomorrow night then and you tell him that!’

  ‘I don’t like a lot of salt,’ he said, after brooding over her answer.

  ‘I see there’s an awful lot of shorthand-typists wanted,’ she muttered.

  ‘Ach, they’re no’ well paid they girls,’ he said. ‘You’re getting more than them, even without your overtime.’

  She turned from the situations vacant to the ads for second-hand furniture, vacuum cleaners, fur coats and tape-recorders.

  ‘What do people buy all these things for if they’re that damned hard-up they’ve got to sell them?’ she asked peevishly. ‘They buy them the one day and want to sell them the next. Aye, they’re all as good as new according to the advert. Aye, I don’t think!’

  She was just going to crumple the paper and dump it in the litter-bin at the bus stop when she saw her married name in small capitals at the foot of a column.

  The whole thing was a sheer fluke, a pure accident, a fortuitous concatenation of circumstances. That Enrico had happened to use that page to put round the chips and that she happened to see the ad at all, was the kind of coincidence that happens every day in the real world that God created but is condemned as far-fetched in the work of a novelist, as if God wasn’t the greatest novelist of all.

  She frowned. She scowled. She stared. She read it three times and squinted over at her driver. He was lighting the remainder of the cigarette he had started at the other end of the route. He didn’t seem to be watching her and she didn’t tell him what she had seen. She wasn’t a woman given to confidences. She tore out the ad roughly and stuffed it quickly in her pocket.

  ‘Are you going after another job?’ her driver asked casually.

  ‘You don’t miss much, do you?’ she answered, crumpling the paper viciously.

  In a little while she was busy collecting fares again as her bus weaved east, and when the top deck was full and she had five standing downstairs she stopped anybody else from boarding, barring them with the lucid command always given by Glasgow bus-conductresses in such circumstances, ‘Come on, get off!’

  She was too harassed to think any more of Percy, who had anyway been displaced by the advertisement she had seen, and she didn’t know that when she passed Partick Cross he was standing with his girl in the back-close of a grey tenement north of her route. The back-close is that part of the close that lies beyond the stairway to the flats and leads to the back-court. Since it usually turns at an angle from the front-close and can’t be seen from the street it is the site of countless Glasgow courtships and seductions. Some write of beds and sofas, some sing of the green cornfields and acres of rye, some tumble panting in the hay, but Glasgow’s sons and lovers have the back-close.

  For all he had a pride in possessing the refinement of a true poet Percy was insensible to the drabness of the setting. He was in a state. It didn’t matter that the midden was only fifteen paces away across the back-court nor that the brown paint of the close was chipped, peeled, and scarred with obscure incisions by the pocket-knives of schoolboys. He was exalted. He had been aching for a girl and now he had one. He had one all to himself, all alone, against the wall though not against her will. He was trembling on the brink. His curiosity was as wide and burning as his ignorance, but it was the way girls dressed disturbed him more than the girls themselves. Indeed the girls he saw every day left him inwardly as cold as a Scots summer. It was advertisements for nylons, brassieres and girdles made his heart quicken, toilet soaps and deodorants told him of breasts and armpits, and foam petticoats under wide skirts whispered to him a warming suggestion of the unseen thighs above the calves and the instep arched by high heels. They all created a mysterious world of elegance, freshness, cleanliness and softness that he longed to enter and embrace, a world not inhabited by the girls he saw every day. But Sophy had long legs and a wide skirt, she had a bust like a girl in a television advert, her hair was glossy, she smelt of soap and something else, so it was Sophy he wanted.

  Of course, his curiosity concerned anatomy as well as underwear. Faces never moved him, for the face was always visible. But he would saunter slowly past the window of a ladies’ gown shop in Sauchiehall Street, squinting in a fluster at the naked wax models of women, and pretend he wasn’t looking at the breasts, belly and thighs at all, his big feet pointing north and south as he ambled west. Not sure of what he had seen he would turn back at a decent distance and stroll past the window again, his head hot with guilt, but he never dared stop and stare and get it right once and for all.

  And now at last he had a girl of his own. Now at last he could come to grips with the problem and be satisfied with the answer. He had survived the first stage of saying goodnight at the bus-stop. He had been given a pass-mark and allowed to enter the second degree of saying goodnight at the close-mouth. Tonight Sophy seemed ready to let him graduate. She let him edge her into the back-close and when they were there she put her handbag on the ground to leave her hands free if he tried to make love to her.

  She was a very junior waitress in a cheap restaurant, a rough eating-house where he went for a midday meal when he first gave up his job. Then he began going there for morning coffee because it wasn’t so busy before lunch, then for afternoon tea too when it was quiet again, and he could sit and look at her in peace. She couldn’t help getting to know him by sight, and when she moved around and Percy sat admiring her bright legs and her hips under her black dress she answered him with a little smirk of a smile over her shoulder. He spoke to her at last with all the confidence in the world, depending on the money in the cellar to see him through all difficulties. Without telling her a direct lie he let her think he was a student. He thought that would explain why he could spend so much time just sitting around. Helet her see he had money by tipping her absurdly every day and making a show of opening his wallet to pay his bill so that she could see the wad of notes inside.

  Naturally she agreed at once to go out with him, but for all his money he never took her anywhere special. He had the money all right, but not the knowledge gained only from experience how to spend it. He was intimidated by the uppish look of expensive places, with a commissionaire at the door, and he never dared cross the threshold. A frugal eater and a non-drinker, he could move only within a narrow circle of cafes and cinemas. It didn’t bother Sophy. A cinema in town and a box of chocolates were luxury enough to her. She wouldn’t have been comfortable drinking cocktails in a hotel lounge. Percy suited her, except when he told her he was a poet. Still, she got over it quickly. She supposed a boy had a right to at least one oddity and she believed poets were great lovers. She waited for the great lover when they embraced in the back-close.

  As for Percy, he had dreamed of this hour and this solitude so long and so often that the reality of it was but a dim substitute for the ideal. Yet because it was the nearest he had come to his desire he felt himself on the verge of great deeds and great discoveries. He believed he was thrilled, and he was. He was wandering in the pathways of the moon, guided by a celestial light that illumed her remote beauty while he drowned in the deep mournfulness of a love not yet made
known and satisfied. He gazed at Sophy’s brow and cheeks and the curve of her throat and his worship grew and grew. He was in bliss. The light of consciousness went out and his heart vibrated in a fecund darkness that promised the unutterable satisfaction he deserved.

  With an inscrutable smile Sophy spoke.

  ‘Did you ever think of writing a pome about me?’ she asked in a voice as if some tender soul imprisoned within her was asking the question. After all, she was only seventeen, though she had been kissed often enough. ‘I mean, when you’re writing your pomes do you ever do one to me? Just how you see me, I mean, when you sit watching me serve the tables and saying what you think about me?’

  ‘Well, I did start something,’ he admitted, red-faced but encouraged by her interest in his work. ‘It’s a sort of song. You know, what Rabbie Burns used to write, that kinda thing.’

  He chanted huskily.

  ‘Doh, soh, me, re-doh.’

  After a nervous swallow he went on, incanting his composition to her in the development of a simple melody.

  Darling, you must know

  How I dream of you

  Morning, noon and night,

  You make the world seem bright,

  Fill me with delight.

  Sweetheart, kiss me gaily

  As I play my ukelele,

  Then just hold me tight,

  Hold me tight and love me right,

  And be mine tonight.

  ‘That’s lovely,’ she beamed the brightness of her smile in the dim corner while his hands fidgeted up and down her flanks. ‘I like the way it rhymes. You could sell that.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t write for money,’ he said proudly.

  ‘But it doesn’t say much about me. I mean, it doesn’t describe me. I’m just not there, am I?’

  ‘Well, that’s not the point,’ he defended his lyric. ‘You see, a poet writes about his emotions, not so much what he sees like, it’s what he feels. That’s what matters to him, what he feels.’